Revisiting Six Sigma at Motorola

Posted by: meikah | 1 December 2008 | 9:53 pm

During this global economic crisis, I don’t see any letup in the telephone or mobile industry. I still see people buying new phones, even new gadgets.

So I asked myself how the communications or telecommunications industry is faring. I took a look first at Motorola for I knew it is a Six Sigma company.

Well, it seems that for Motorola, it is business as usual, and that business is doing good. Check out the recent Motorola news: launched WiMax in Vietnam and Jordan, deployed Motorola’s innovative wireless technologies in schools, launched the latest models in its range of stylish, digital cordless home-phone, and more.

If you remember, Motorola is known worldwide as a quality leader.

To accomplish its quality and total customer satisfaction goals, Motorola concentrates on several key operational initiatives. At the top of the list is Six Sigma Quality, a statistical measure of variation from a desired result. In concrete terms, Six Sigma translates into a target of no more than 3.4 defects per million products, customer services included. At the manufacturing end, this requires “robust designs” that accommodate reasonable variation in component parts while providing consistently uniform final products. Motorola employees record the defects found in every function of the business, and statistical technologies are made a part of each and every employee’s job.

As a result, reduced “total cycle time,” that is the time from when a Motorola customer places an order until it is delivered-is another vital part of the company’s quality initiatives. In fact, in the case of new products, Motorola’s cycle-time reduction is even more ambitious; the clock starts ticking the moment the product is conceived. This calls for an examination of the total system, including design, manufacturing, marketing, and administration.

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 Filed under: Six Sigma Organizations, Software/Technology, Telecommunications, Motorola, Quality, Six Sigma | |